"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

Okay, there's been a lot of discussion about April Fools this year... was it a success, was it a failure, did it actually happen? The answer to all those questions is YES, which was also the answer to the question I asked your sister last night. Here's how it went down (April Fools, not your sister):

March 26th rolls around, and the admins realize we haven't come up with a plan. Some ideas are tossed around, but none stick.

March 29th, RK comes up with the idea of creating a new member claiming to have inside knowledge about PTA's new project. Eventually, it's narrowed down to Shia Labeouf being cast as Freddie. It's left up to me to create the new guy and do the first bunch of postings, and then, on the day, Mac is going to post a supposed Variety article confirming his claims.

March 30th, brother macmanus is born. He is loosely based on a guy I went to college with, a complete tool who liked to boast that he had "connections" with Steven Spielberg because he had a friend of a friend who had some low-level job at Amblin Entertainment around the time of Jurassic Park 2. He also was most likely a huge Boondock Saints fan, though I have no verification of that. So he has a name, he has a character, picolas supplies the avatar, and he's off and running.

The idea is that his first post would be short and sweet. Bold statement, nothing to back it up. It works briefly, but suspicions are soon raised about the Boondock Saints connection. Admin HQ goes into full panic mode. Did we go too far with the Boondock Saints? Should we have put more in the first post?

Hell, no! Post number two sells it! Indignant about the possibility of someone not believing his inside info, brother macmanus offers up a randomly plausible-sounding nugget... Matt Saracen from Friday Night Lights. Who would make that up? If I hadn't written it myself, I would have believed it.

By this time, April Fools Day is only a day away, and I have to sell sell sell as fast as I can to set up for the big reveal. All is going well, until April First rolls around, and I make the biggest fuck up of all.

As I said, the idea was for bro-mac to set up the possibility of Lebeouf, and then Mac would hit us with the Variety article and make our heads collectively explode. Had we started the plan a week earlier, I could have made all the same posts stretched farther apart, played the whole "the role is Labeouf's if he wants it" card a few days prior to the First, and then the Variety article would hit on April Fools Day, at which point we hope nobody has a calendar nearby. But instead, having to cram the whole thing into two days, I overplayed my hand and nobody folded.

Once again, Admin HQ goes into lockdown as we ponder the biggest Xixax April Fools Day Fail in our history (also my first as an admin... let's not linger on that connection for too long). Out of desperation to wring some last drop of humor out of the day, RK makes the suggestion to edit everyone's skeptical responses to be positive ones. I don't know if it was funny for anyone else, but it was for us.

In the interest of keeping brother macmanus as viable character, I decide to have him flip his shit about nobody believing his scoop. Sort of works, whatever. I got Silias to feel bad for the guy. We're basically clusterfucking at this point.

BUT WAIT! There's still a possibility to salvage this. Mac's Variety article hasn't been posted yet, so we decide to wait a day, then post it with a different actor cast as Freddie, one who hasn't been mentioned in any of macmanus' posts. Specifically, the sparkly vampire from Twilight.

Mac posts the Variety news, people kind of sort of seem to almost buy it, so I follow up with a Hollywood Reporter link that goes nowhere, which seems to keep it alive a little longer.

Of course, we didn't really anticipate that for the most part people were totally cool with the idea of the sparkly vampire from Twilight being cast. Maybe that was the April Fools prank you all played on us...

So that was April Fools. Hastily planned, unevenly executed, and questionably successful. But for those keeping score:

-If you believed that brother macmanus was a real person, XIXAX WINS APRIL FOOLS DAY.

-If you believed (even for a moment) that Shia Labeouf was going to be in The Master, XIXAX WINS APRIL FOOLS DAY.

-If, after deciding that Shia was an April Fools joke, you believed that the sparkly vampire from Twilight was going to be in The Master, XIXAX WINS APRIL FOOLS DAY.

-If, after being unable to open the Hollywood Reporter link, you tried clearing your cache like I advised you to, I NOW OWN YOUR SOUL (I'll be gentle with it).

-If you didn't know by April 3rd whether or not we had done anything for April Fools Day, XIXAX WINS APRIL FOOLS DAY.

Well done. I thought the Variety article sounded a bit made up, but it did tempt me to almost rent New Moon. What makes me ill is that I was almost coming around to Pattinson in the film.....I got worked.

I still like Renner for the part.

Logged

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.